Websites change, go away, and are taken down. In general, we understand that the Web is ephemeral and we’re okay with encountering the occasional 404. We can tell ourselves, “Hey, don’t worry about it. There are at least 542 million other cat pictures out there. I’ll find another one.” Sometimes though, you are linking to something important and it’s a huge bummer to lose the content at the other end of the link. Like when you’re reading a Supreme Court opinion and every other link you click on is dead.

The problem of missing linked content, or reference rot, is solvable though and we’ve taken a stab at it. Our solution is Perma.cc.

At Perma.cc, any author (you!) can input a URL for archiving. When you submit the URL to Perma.cc, Perma.cc will, in realtime, download the content at that URL and pass back to you a new URL (a “Perma.cc link”). You can then insert the new link into your scholarly paper, blog entry, or Supreme Court opinion. For example, if you’re referencing the Dole Kemp ’96 campaign site, you’ll give Perma.cc, dolekemp96.org, and Perma.cc will return http://perma.cc/0M9BDKrtCL6 to you for insertion into your publication.

Perma.cc is a big effort and we knew we’d be in over our heads if we tried to go it alone. So, we found some friends — 30 or so amazing partners that are helping us build the product and host the archived sites.

Libraries are ideal partners for Perma.cc. They are uniquely situated to battle reference rot — they’re trusted sources, they’re good at archiving, and they think on a long timescale.

During the Library Machines session, we’ll all go through a quick, “mad libs” style design exercise, and use that as a jumping off point for a larger discussion through the rest of the session.

1) If you’re going to be at SXSW, join us! this will be a discussion and making session, not a presentation

2) If all goes according to plan, outside this session we should be facilitating a bunch of library “innovation”-y fun stuff so reach out if you’re interested in helping! (jgoldenson AT law.harvard.edu)

Do Things that Don’t Scale“one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn’t work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they’ll make it big if and only if they’re launched with sufficient ini – Matt Phillips